After Brexit, last week delivered another potentially far-reaching result for radical right populists in Europe. On Friday, Austria’s Constitutional Court upheld a challenge brought by the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) against the outcome of the May 22 presidential election. The run-off, in which the Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen finished narrowly ahead of the FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer, will have to be run again.

Although Hofer lost the second round, his 49.7% result was still an important landmark. It showed that voting for such parties may no longer be the preserve of a clear minority. Another 30,000 or so votes and Western Europe would have had its first radical right populist president. After the successful court challenge, it still might.

If Hofer is eventually elected, it won’t be the first time Austria witnesses the dawn of a new era for the far right. At the beginning of the century, in January 2000, all of Austria’s European Union (EU) partners issued an ultimatum: if the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) went ahead with plans to form a governing coalition with the FPÖ – whose values were considered in conflict with the EU’s – sanctions would be imposed.

The ÖVP did not back down. The FPÖ took its place in a government led by the ÖVP’s Wolfgang Schüssel and Austria became a pariah within the EU. Sanctions lasted until September 2000, when an expert report found no problems with Austria’s human rights record and concluded that the FPÖ ministers had behaved themselves so far.

A lot has changed since 2000 when Wolfgang Schüssel faced EU sanctions for including the Austrian Freedom Party in his government.Russian Presidential Press, CC BY

Thinking back to the international controversy Austria aroused 16 years ago reminds us how much has changed in Western Europe. Since then, radical right populist parties have participated as junior coalition partners in Italy, the Netherlands, Finland and Greece.

Radical right populist parties have also provided centre-right governments with essential parliamentary support in exchange for policy concessions in Denmark and, again, the Netherlands. They have increasingly become, to use the German term, koalitionsfähig: “coalitionable”.

Learning to manage power

Back in the early years of the last decade, moderates consoled themselves with the fact that the FPÖ’s time in coalition government turned out to be a very damaging shambles for the party. It lost votes and ministers at an alarming rate. Eventually, the party split.

Since then, academics have cited the case of the FPÖ as exemplifying why power is bad for populists. Inclusion in government will either tame or break them. It might even do both.

However, while the Austrian case may have been a key moment in the history of Western European radical right populist parties, the negative experience of the FPÖ in government has not been shared by all Western European radical right populists.

In our 2015 book Populists in Power, Daniele Albertazzi and I looked at what happened when right-wing populists in Italy and Switzerland entered into government. In the case of the Northern League (LN) in Italy and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), we found that – unlike the FPÖ – these parties were able to achieve key policy victories and survive the experience of government without toning down their rhetoric or losing the support of voters and party members.

Notably, in our interviews and surveys with representatives and grassroots members of the two parties, we found that they were not radical hotheads with unrealistic expectations. Instead, they were generally pragmatic about the policy gains that could be achieved and the compromises that being in power with other parties entails.

The Austrian Freedom Party’s Heinz-Christian Strache, Front National’s Marine Le Pen and Northern League’s Matteo Salvini are leading party organisations built to last.Reuters

Building parties to last

The ability to keep their members on board was due not only to the successes on their main issues achieved by the LN and SVP in government, but also to the attention devoted by both parties to their grassroots.

Whether they were in large cities or small provincial towns, members told us they felt that their party cared about them. They also believed they were part of an important mission to protect their communities from the threats that a series of distant elites and dangerous “others” (especially immigrants) posed to their wellbeing and identity.

The importance most radical right populists attach to party organisation, in addition to their key issues like immigration, also helps explain why the FPÖ was able to survive many setbacks in the last decade and bounce back to enjoy electoral successes under its new leader, Heinz-Christian Strache.

With the exception of Geert Wilders’ “memberless party”, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, radical right populist parties in 21st-century Western Europe are being built to last. They are not dependent on a single leader like personal parties such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.

Long-established parties like the French Front National, the Italian Northern League and the Danish People’s Party have all seen their founder-leaders step down in recent years and are doing better than ever in the polls.

The next challenge for radical right populists in Western Europe, if and when one of them becomes the leading party in government, will be coping with the new pressures of being in power. Given current opinion polls in Austria, which show the FPÖ well ahead of both the traditional major parties, the next general election – to be held by 2018 – could well deliver a coalition featuring the FPÖ as the lead party with a mainstream junior partner.

Austria may therefore find itself in a few years’ time with both a radical right president and chancellor.

If the European Union’s silence about Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy in Hungary is anything to go by, the EU’s leading lights are unlikely to raise much more than a murmur of protest if we do enter a new era of radical right populists in power in Austria or elsewhere in Western Europe.

And, this time around, don’t necessarily expect the populists to fail at it either.

2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

Event Details

Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

Event Details

Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

Event Details

Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au